Simplify My Life Challenge – Home Maintenance Plan

Owning a home is usually the cause of pride, however it can also mean a lot of extra upkeep and maintenance needed compared to renting. There are several types of home maintenance we should be doing each year to ensure our home and contents remain in their best possible condition. However you would not be alone if you admitted many of these things were not high on your list of priorities… until something goes wrong.

SIMPLIFY MY LIFE HOME MAINTENANCE

This month as part of our Simplify My Life organisation task we look at creating a home maintenance plan which will hopefully save not only time and money, but also a whole lot of stress in the long run, by helping us avoid those unexpected and unfortunate malfunctions and dramas.

When you hear the words home maintenance, the first things that come to mind are likely to do with actual physical maintenance on your home, however it actually goes beyond all that. Yes it is great to give the home a bit of a makeover after a period of time, with the regular need for gardening and landscaping or the less frequent painting or remodelling, but home maintenance also covers all those smaller, yet important areas of the home too.

Organise My Life

Each year or so, sometimes less, sometimes more often, depending on the area of focus, we should aim to have our internal and external home maintenance conducted. This is something that can be difficult to keep track of, unless the service providers are sending you frequent reminders as they sometimes do. So setting up a schedule for your own records can help you stay on top of it.

Here are some of the areas that should be considered as part of your home maintenance plan:

Annual

Air conditioner/heating system service

Pest inspection

Carpet cleaning

Appliance service/check

Smoke alarm battery replacement

Clean out gutters

More Frequent

Landscaping and lawn mowing

Car service (not strictly home related but still essential)

Now to help you keep track of your home maintenance plan each year, I have of course created a simple printable for you to list and record details of what is due and when, as well as details on cost, who and when. You can download your free home maintenance plan below:

Now it’s time to get on top of all those tasks you have been putting off, or perhaps have not even thought about so you can potentially save yourself loads of money in the long run by keeping your home and garden well maintained and serviced.

Pop over to the challenge page to find lots more useful printables and tasks to get your life simplifed and organised now.

Are you on top of your household maintenance, or are you more of a when it’s broken, get it fixed type of person?

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About Holly

Holly is the Editor and Owner of Simplify Create Inspire. She is an Aussie mum, wife, and corporate drop-out, focused on simplifying and finding that elusive work/life balance, while juggling her own business. She also owns a family travel blog to document her other big passion, - exploring the world.

Cleaning the oven always ends up being delayed far longer than intended in this house too. We got a new oven a few months ago and have yet to clean it despite the goal to be pro-active and keep it clean. Oops!

I would also suggest adding these items to your budget. Appliance services, pest inspections and carpet cleans are not cheap. More often than I not I will put these things off longer than I should simply due to finances. Plus I hate spending money on things you can’t actually see :-/

Don’t forget that if you have a wireless house alarm like we do, that the batteries for the siren will need replacing periodically. I am tempted to add them to the calendar each year like the smoke detectors should be, just to avoid the situation we had the other week! The batteries had well and truly died on us (because they had never been replaced!) and we ended up spending 2 hours or more on getting it sorted, and had to reboot the whole system to get it all talking to itself again! We still have some detectors which need programming back in :S

Definitely a good one to add in. I hadn’t thought of that one as we don’t have an alarm, but the smoke alarms is one for all of us to keep on top of. We are lucky ours are wired into the house but with battery back up. They still remind us with annoying beeping when the time comes to change the battery.

Great idea Holly, far too often the years roll by before I remember some of these things. We are right on it with the aircon service now, we have a copy booked in to do them on the same date each year, they just send us a text a week and then a day before to remind us they are coming. Thank you for linking up with #HIT

Ours are due too. We actually have 3 which is kind of crazy but only use the one in the main lounge room (other than Christmas when we sometimes run the front room one when opening pressies). The 3rd is in the nursery and never gets used. The kids both sleep in our room :-/ lol

They are all there in one spot to make it a bit easier to find at least. I almost need to go back and re-do some areas already myself. Planning to make it at least a yearly habit. Good luck tackling the rest of the areas. I look forward to hearing how you go 🙂

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Welcome! I'm Holly, a work at home mum of two young girls, on a journey to simplify our household. This is my place to share the ideas, inspirations and processes to help you to simplify, save, create and build a life that you love. Read More…